Roman Mittermayr: On My Way

The Art of Keeping People Busy

As the year 2010 was breathing its last moments, I finalized my resignation letter to Microsoft. It was a tough e-mail to write (yeah, I tend to break up by e-mail) – but, it wasn’t without a new challenge ahead, something that would keep me very, very busy. And that’s good, especially since the trend on my bank account reversed, a pretty depressing fact of being a so-called entrepreneur. I’ve spend most of the first part of 2011 with designing, iterating, developing and touching up what is known as twentypeople.com today. A lot has changed with each iteration, but one thing still puzzles me: The Art of Keeping People Busy… here’s what it’s all about:

You start designing a site, people tell you it’s nice (nobody expects anything). Then, you realize the site looks terrible, you re-design, iterate, re-design. Then you love it, visually. But it’s not selling the point good enough yet. You work on the copy, on the concept, you iterate, drop parts, add new parts. You push it out again, people come in, sign up. Silence. You talk with other entrepreneurs, where, weird enough it seems, everyone is concerned about getting users to sign up, to press that button, to pass the 5-second yes/no/maybe span of attention. But this didn’t happen at all, with my site. I have a tough sign-up process, it takes some 2 to 10 minutes getting all set up. A LOT longer than anyone would recommend. Yet, a lot of the visitors (real people) go ahead and sign up. That’s absolutely not a problem, nothing I’d find in need to improve. But what puzzles me is, people come in masses, try everything out, fill out their profiles, and then they go. Goodbye, forever.

It seems like this links up with a simple thought: There was nothing for them to do on the site. True, that could be the whole explanation. But think of LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Ebay, etc. – most of these sites require a trigger event to happen, in order to get you going and actually visit the site - compared to other sites, which naturally should be expecting insane amounts of traffic. What? Read on, here’s a comparison of triggers:

• LinkedIn/XING: The broad masses revisit LinkedIn when someone added them or a message was received. Rarely otherwise.
• Flickr/TwitPic/: Someone invited you to see a set of pictures (event/vacation), or, you just came back from vacation and need a place to host/share the photos.
• Tumblr: You are bored and are clicking through places that entertain you. Means: You read other people’s stuff, or you get it together and write a bit yourself.
• eBay: You can’t find an item cheap enough at major vendors, or you really need to get rid of stuff and get some money back now.

Now, some might already prepare to fire a comment that Flickr does have a lot of professional users, or that LinkedIn is used by recruiters, or that Tumblr is a great place to discover photo feeds and more of that. Again, I’m not talking about professional/niche/nerd users. I’m talking of masses, wide and broad masses. Major traffic. 

To make sense of the above list, here’s a list of sites that have a completely different model:

• Facebook: You want to know what’s going on, you need to know. You feel out of touch if you don’t check up on your friends. And, best place to share what’s going on in your life, in everyone’s face.
• Google: There are more questions than answers in most of our day-to-day problems, and we head on over to Google to ask it anything. Really anything that comes to our mind. It takes us places, it gives us answers. There’s daily need.
• Spotify/Pandora: Most people don’t just listen to music every other month. Fact is, a lot of us want music daily. At work, at home. And we want new stuff, all the time. While I barely get bored by John Mayer songs, listening through the albums over and over again, most people will pass albums quickly and want new stuff. Music is a healthy drug and has a lot of consumers. Spotify truly entertains people, daily.
• Groupon: I hate Groupon, deeply. But I see why it took off so wildly. Buying at heavy discounts, being that person who got that cooking class for 30% of the price everyone else pays, that’s hardcore addiction-ready material to the masses. Check back, every day, more deals please. 
• Twitter: Alarm clock rings, you wake up. You want to know what’s been happening while you were asleep, so you naturally fire up Twitter. You run into an old friend, you tweet it. You retweet your friends graduation photo, you tweet about why your day sucks. Twitter is in your phone, with you, everywhere. 

And, if you’re still reading, here’s the last piece that ties the above blabla together:

There is a clear distinction between businesses who are operating on a “help with a random problem” issue, versus companies who are your daily companion. You go through design iterations (and notice, hell, even have opinions about them) and if someone shut it down, a dent in your daily schedule would be left behind, for a while at least. 

Now, currently, my business is a trigger business. People need a new job. Or, an employer might be desperate about filling an open position, sign up and promote the job. It’s triggers. Then they wait. They will come back when something happens again. But spend their days with more important things, while they have time to do so.

And, if you’re eBay - who cares! Flickr? Nothing to worry about. These sites have climbed up the ladder to endless traffic momentum. There’s always someone, in this world, being triggered. Well, some hundreds of thousands, to be precise.

But, as a startup, this is depressing. I assume a lot of smaller companies out there constantly question the quality of their site, the design, the pitch/message. Wonder why VCs aren’t interested right now, or why people visit once and never come again. Question yourself what type of business you are building.

Ask yourself whether your concept might have enough potential to actually steal time from people’s precious schedules (and give them something worthy back). Remember, everyone only has a few hours a day to spend doing random shit vs. getting on with life. 

There is absolutely no need to be that daily companion type-of-business. But if you are, lucky bastard. It’s tough these days, finding a place to develop new things, that movie’s always sold out.

If not, think of ways to give people daily benefits. Make them happy, enrich their day, reward them for spending even the shortest minute on your site, checking on things. Or, invest a lot of money into marketing to scale up to reach natural momentum.

Thoughts? This is work in progress.